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If you know any of these names, restaurants or terms, than it might be time to explore sous vide cooking in your own home. But even if you don’t know these folks at the cutting edge of the trend that has also been called “technologically forward cosine,” you might still be interested in sous vide, because if you eat out at all you have probably already consumed many foods cooked this way – unknown to much of the dining public, the technique has a long history (Wikipedia dates the concept to the 18th century) and is widely used in restaurant kitchens at all price points. So if you like good food and like cooking, why leave another valuable tool out of your home repertoire?

I had seen sous vide machines in many commercial kitchens, but when the folks who make the Sous Vide Supreme, the leading home model, asked me to try it, I was a little intimidated, associating the device with the above mentioned chefs who make their living with tanks of liquid nitrogen and centrifuges, by turning normal foods into smoke, and serving ultra-concentrated liquefied dishes in test tubes. But among the many uses of technology in today’s molecular gastronomy kitchen, sous vide is about the simplest – you could think of it as fancy version of the crock pot.

Popular with the world’s leading chefs, sous vide is a form of cooking that uses vacuum sealed pouches in a precisely controlled hot water bath. The Sous Vide Supreme shown is the leading model for home kitchen use.

Sous vide is a form of cooking wherein foods are vacuum-sealed in airtight plastic bags, then immersed in a precisely controlled, low temperature, heated water bath. Essentially that’s it. It’s not so much the technique as the results that matter, and the results are threefold. First, this method of cooking does not allow the interior temperature of the food to rise above the preset temperature of the water, meaning in essence that is it is virtually impossible to overcook anything. Sous vide also cooks the food evenly to the temperature from the outside to the middle. If you like rare beef, usually around 130°, you set at 130° and that’s what you get – in every bite, not just the center. In comparison, most steakhouses cook beef at very high temperatures, up to 800°, so a minute of overcooking has a pronounced affect. Even other forms of low temperature cooking, like smoking BBQ, allow for easy overcooking. Most pros smoke at around 225° but the USDA recommendation for pork is 145° so it’s easy to dry out ribs. The beauty of sous vide is that the food never gets above the preset temperature, even though some cuts cook for 48 hours or more. The third characteristic of this style, besides allowing very precise control over the finished internal temperature, is that sous vide does not change the exterior of the food, there is none of the maillard reaction typical in other forms of meat cookery, and your steak or pork or chicken will not brown at all. This not a positive, but more on that below.

One of my pork chops ready for sous vide cooking.

In the past two months, since I laid my hands on the Sous Vide Supreme, I have been asking chefs at pretty much every restaurant I’ve been to what they most like to use their sous vide setups for, and the answers have been pretty consistent. In the typical restaurant setting the big pros are any cuts that need to break down by slow cooking, like shanks, pork shoulder, short ribs, etc. Pork chops, notoriously difficult to cook through without drying out, are another chef sous vide favorite, as is chicken. Fish, much more delicate and easily overcooked, is also a popular application, and this makes a lot of sense given that sous vide is in the same ballpark as poaching, a popular seafood technique. Rack of lamb, typically served rare, is a perfect vehicle for sous vide and one many chefs mentioned.

Sous vide is not just for meats, and you can cook many more things: the various cookbooks and pamphlets that came with the machine include recipes for one pot (in this case one bag) dishes like stews, and multiple ingredient dishes using multiple pouches, such as an Indian Balti beef where the meat and vegetables are cooked separately and then combined. There are recipes for sous vide deserts, appetizers, veggies and even a whole book on cocktails, but bear in mind, the goal of these is to help sell sous vide machines, not necessarily to make your life easier. A similar broad range of intricate recipes came with my crock pot but I use it solely for stews and chili. Pretty much any kitchen gizmo you buy, from a rice cooker to microwave to ice cream maker, will try to convince you that it can also do all these other things, and maybe it can, but that’s not a reason to do them. The aforementioned cutting edge chefs do use the machines for all sorts of intricate dishes, and in Modernist Cuisine, by far the number one book on the subject of molecular gastronomy, Nathan Myhrvold poaches eggs sous vide and describes using partial sous vide cooking as one step in his creation of the perfect burger, a process that stretches over 24 hours (he also specifically showcases the Sous Vide Supreme). There are lots of recipes for cooking simple vegetables like potatoes, carrots and onions, but it is hard for a decent home cook to accept why you need to bother with the extra step and cost of vacuum sealing and the additional cooking time, when you can already cook these things just fine.

The other half of the Sous Vide Supreme home equation is the vacuum sealer.

That’s not the case with many meats. Contrary to their personal beliefs and egos, most people can’t decently cook a steak, for starters, and in Modernist Cuisine at Home (that’s the one volume abridged version of Myhrvold’s 6-volume, 2,400-page, $500 magnum opus, Modernist Cuisine, which costs more than the sous vide machine) his lab experiments and detailed photos clearly show the results of a traditionally cooked steak in a pan and one done sous vide, starting with identical cuts and cooking them to the same internal temperature. The sous vide version is much more appetizing, uniformly rare from outside to center, while the pan cooked one starts at gray and move towards red at the center, like most steaks, with 40% of the meat overcooked (you can see this telling photo online at the Modernist Cuisine site, which argues the merits of sous vide passionately).

So after various real world experiments my take is that sous vide cooking is neither a bizarre niche nor a replacement for all other techniques, but rather a style of cooking, like braising, that works really well for limited applications. To my surprise, cooking fish (I did both tuna and salmon) did not wow me. It’s safer in the sense that less can go wrong, but the fish didn’t taste any better than the conventionally cooked version I made.

That is not the case for pork chops, which came out so much better sous vide that I’d be hard pressed to eat them cooked any other way – they were tender, juicy and bursting with flavor. This was a magnificent advantage of the technique, which not only doesn’t dry out foods by its very nature, but also seals in all juices thanks to the vacuum packing. Anything you throw in before vacuum sealing, from dry spice rubs to fresh herbs to a pat of butter is amplified during the slow cooking process (I did a round of pork chops with a spoonful of bacon fat and almost cried when I tried them). Likewise, short ribs, a recently very popular cut, came out superb. They were just as tender as slow braised (the usual method and one I’ve made many times) but retained their form better for a more knife and fork steak-like experience, rather than the mushy bone falling out result you usually get from braising. I haven’t tried it but I would imagine the technique would work very well for leaner meats like grass-finished natural beef, venison and bison which are easier to dry out, like pork chops. Thicker cuts of beef, like tenderloin, are also an excellent application – if you like your steak rare, it’s easier to get it right in a pan when cooking a thin strip steak or similar cut, but virtually impossible to keep a tenderloin or roasting cut rare throughout, except with sous vide. I also tried racks of pork and beef spareribs, and while the consistency was good, I missed the smoky infused flavor of low and slow smoking and won’t substitute sous vide for my smoker again. Vegetables as a whole did little for me, and at least in my kitchen, the machine will be broken out mainly for pork chops, thicker steaks and beef cuts, and all sorts of braising cuts. The one advantage of doing veggies or other sides along with the meat is ease of cleanup, which requires simply cutting open the pouches and pouring out the water.

The beef spareribs I made sous vide were easy to cook, tender and attractive, but lacked the smokiness of traditional wood-smoked BBQ.

One caveat of sous vide cooking is that since the meats don’t brown at all, and most people, especially your guests, will find this unappetizing, a final step is required to create a finished exterior. For restaurant chefs, this is often done with a blowtorch. The idea is that any sort of continued exposure to high heat will defeat the whole purpose of sous vide, so you need a quick sear. For home cooks they recommend a very hot frying pan and quick sear and flip, or likewise, a very hot grill. I found a pan was easier to get very hot and finish quickly, but this works better on something flat like a pork chop or shank than a chicken breast. It’s also another step after cooking, in addition to the step beforehand of vacuum sealing. The timing of sous vide cooking is a double edged sword: There is a convenience factor of putting it in and forgetting about it, even while you go to work, but it also requires planning – a big shank I made wanted 48 hours in the water according to instructions, plus another day to defrost, so we are talking about starting Friday dinner on Tuesday. More typical things like pork chops only take about 4 hours, but that’s’ still 6-8 times as long as more transitional methods. On the other hand it makes for easy entertaining, since it is hands off and if dinner is running late during cocktail hour, the food can simply remain harmlessly in the water, and it’s quick and easy to go from there to plating.

The Sours Vide Supreme looks sort of like a bread maker or home deep fryer, a rectangular stainless steel cube that you fill with water, with a control panel on the front. The design is intuitive and easy to use, has some nice features like a vertical rack for multiple pouch cooking, an insulated pad to cover the top and increase efficiency, and the separate vacuum sealer, once you figure it out the first time, is very easy to use. The standard model is $429 for the cooker alone or $499 for a starter pack that includes the vacuum sealer, a couple of boxes of cooking bags and collateral cookbooks (you can’t get very far without the vacuum sealer, unless you already have one, though you can cook sous vide in jars, canning style). They also offer a smaller “demi” version in black or red for $329 or $419 for the kit. The biggest problem for most home cooks will be the addition of two more sizable machines which will probably be stashed away between uses, which historically diminishes the likelihood of any kitchen gizmo actually getting used. Still, based on the delicious pork chops, short ribs and steaks I tried, the device is worth the extra real estate, and more ambitious, scientifically minded cooks may get much more out of it.

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